Joe Scarborough Demands Producers Keep Drudge Report’s Liz Cheney ‘Execution’ Take On Screen
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough repeatedly demanded his producers keep the Drudge Report’s Liz Cheney “Execution” headline on screen throughout Friday’s broadcast as he reacted to former President Donald Trump’s comments about the GOP ex-congresswoman.
During a campaign event in Arizona with Tucker Carlson on Thursday, Trump branded Cheney, a high-profile Republican surrogate for Harris, a “warhawk” before offering a dark analogy: “Let’s put her with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Trump’s campaign later added that he was speaking about Cheney’s willingness to send “America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.”
As backlash rolled out, the Drudge Report headlined its page with the following take: “TRUMP CALLS FOR CHENEY’S EXECUTION” – linking to the clip on social media.
At the beginning of Morning Joe on Friday, Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski flashed the Drudge homepage on their phone as he reacted. He then asked producers: “Guys, if we can screenshot Drudge and put it up, that would be great.”
Scarborough later protested to producers to “keep it up” as he slammed newspapers who had refused to endorse a candidate in the election.
Throughout the early segments of the show, as guests and contributors offered their views, Scarborough badgered his team to show the Drudge frontpage, arguing that otherwise “people won’t believe it.”
Then, again, later, he called for producers to put the Drudge headline on-screen as he attacked “condescending” critics who accused him of pushing the “fascist meme.”
Put the Drudge Report back up because people won’t believe it. For all the doubting Thomases out there going, ‘Oh Joe. Listen, it’s a really bad time. These are much smaller times, but it is a really bad idea for you to…’ fill in the blank.
They’d go, ‘Oh Joe, oh Joe,’ so condescending. Three months later: ‘Oh, we should have listened to you.’ Here, it’s Trump people [referring to Drudge’s headline]. ‘Oh Joe, you and your fascist meme.’
As contributor Katty Kay discussed the fallout over the comments, Scarborough shouted out to producers again: “Let’s put up Drudge one more time.”
Scarborough made the call a further time when MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann came on the air.
Watch above on MSNBC.
